Developing a content strategy lets you have clear step-by-step goals to grow your blog.
A successful content strategy focuses on regularly planning, creating, and delivering content to your audience.
That said, the success of a blog’s content strategy depends on various factors, including your niche, blog goals, success metrics, and purpose.
Firstly, you’ll want to identify your niche and the goals/metrics for measuring your success.
You’ll also want to ensure your niche (i.e., pet product reviews and pet information) is a niche worth pursuing.
Once you’ve done that, you can move on to developing a content strategy around your interest, goals, and purpose to help you steadily grow your blog.
Your content strategy should focus on what content to write, how to get visitors/readers, and how to retain visitors/readers.
Here’s what a successful golfing blog’s content strategy might look like:
Golf Blog Content Strategy:
- Research and create content focused on affordable golf clubs for first-time golfers
- Check other golfing websites to identify their content strategies
- Find what’s popular on other blogs and determine what readers want
- Post insightful, educational, and resourceful articles three times a week to get readers coming back regularly
- Develop buying guides that break down each type of golf club to help visitors identify the best options
- Sell helpful golfing products and services to monetize the blog
- Create the content on accessories readers may want besides golf clubs
- Look for ways to promote the blog through email and social media
From this example, the content strategy starts with finding valuable and exciting content.
You can research topics to write about from related blogs, google searches, and keyword research tools like Ahrefs.
Next, you develop a monetization strategy to earn an income.
It includes promoting affiliate products, creating buyer guides, and selling your products.
Finally, the content strategy ends with looking for ways to promote the blog to gain a readership and sell products/services.
It incorporates social media, email, YouTube, SEO, and other strategies to get readers to your blog.
You develop an in-depth content strategy to define your blog and how to grow it using these steps.
It can take several months or years to reach your goals.
It also takes a lot of work to generate traffic and make money, especially for a new blogger.
However, you can simultaneously accomplish each step to support growing your blog.
This nursing blog utilized many of the previously mentioned steps when it started and slowly became more resourceful and full-featured over time.
It started with the first step, then moved on to the second step as it grew without trying to do everything simultaneously.
A new blog content strategy may look like this:
- Identity what my blog is going to be about (topics, purpose, and goals)
- Do some basic research on the main topic(s)
- Create 10 – 20 in-depth articles about the chosen topic
- Look for related topics to write about after completing the first 10 – 20 articles
- Find products and services that fit into those topics
- Promote those products and services to begin building an income
You can reinvest your earnings when you reach specific goals.
It allows you to hire writers, construct a professional website theme, or do things that fit your vision, goals, and purpose.
Growing a blog is a process; you must manage it one step at a time.
You don’t need to over-complicate the process when you’re first starting, as it’s the surest way to lose motivation quickly.
Start with a handful of articles you want to write about, and when you feel confident, take the next step towards moving forward with the process.
By building your content strategy step by step and topic by topic, you’ll remain clear about your goals and ensure that you stay highly productive.
A content strategy creates and shares the right content with the right audience to reach its goals and achieve its purpose.
If your content strategy is too complicated initially, you should simplify it until it makes sense and allows you to move forward with your goals on time.
Keep things simple and progress at a pace you can manage.
Six Helpful Steps for Developing a Content Strategy
- Identify your audience (ex., car enthusiast, golfer, tech lover, nurse, student, fashionista, etc.)
- Identify popular topics on other blogs/websites (these are the topics readers love and share)
- Do a lot of keyword research (you can learn more about keyword research here)
- Develop a content plan based on your research to help your blog become an authority on the topic
- Determine what strategies you’ll focus on to gain visitors (email marketing, guest posting, social media, SEO, etc.)
- Look for ways to monetize your blog to earn money and reinvest your earnings.
Hopefully, this step-by-step guide on how to develop a content strategy for your blog is helpful.
You can also read the following articles on blogging for more information.